B.C. Place screen lighting
up the city the wrong way
Since the installation of a giant
LED screen at B.C. Place, Douglas Coupland’s memorial to
Terry Fox has taken on a weird
twilight vibe. The four sculpted
figures are positioned with their
backs to the screen, as if the
one-legged athlete is attempting to outrun a wormhole of
electronic advertising.
Downtown resident David
Cookson has been petitioning
for the removal or relocation
of the screen (one of three on
the site) for weeks. He insists it
“desecrates” the memory of Fox,
and it’s difficult to argue otherwise. The brief video clips on the
screen honouring the athlete,
bumped up in frequency since
Cookson’s campaign began, sit
uncomfortably with ads for mobile phones and pop drinks.
Beyond the optics of a Canadian hero stomping away from
three-storey advertisements,
there is the matter of public
safety with the screen overlooking the pedestrian-clogged
corner of Beatty and Robson.
Cookson is mostly focused on
candlepower, however. It’s impossible to get used to the bombardment of a “flashing electric
lighting bolt” into his home every
30 to 40 seconds, he says. “The
flashing in the house is very different from the constant light
that stays on when you have a
hue or glow coming off the top
during a game.”
Cookson feels that the official attitude is that residents of
the downtown core are “open
game,” having freely “invited
this kind of harassment because we live downtown.”
He added: “This is an entertainment district up to Beatty
Street but that’s a residential
neighbourhood beyond. You’d
think they’d be super-sensitive
that we have these two very
different kinds of zoning in very
close proximity.”
PavCo, the Crown corporation behind the new B.C. Place
and the screen, has chosen to
turn off the offender at 7 p.m.,
excluding “major event nights”
at the stadium. This concession
is a non-starter for Cookson. He
notes that the sun sets early for
a large portion of the year, ranging from 4 to 6 p.m. “So to say
this thing is going to turn off at 7
o’clock means they decide when
we can enjoy our homes.”
The frequently flashed, allwhite Telus ads are particularly bright. For Cookson, the
telecom’s darling piglets and
beatboxing owls no longer suggest connectivity, but rather a
disconnect between business
and community. “I explained to
them [Telus] that by providing
ad revenues to PavCo they…
should take some responsibility
for this.” Earlier this week, Telus

letters of the week

geoffolson
media representative Shawn
Hall responded to a Courier
email enquiry with this statement: “When the issue first
came to our attention we spoke
to B.C. Place about it, and were
advised the screen’s hours of
operation would be reduced
and that it would be dimmed
after twilight. Given the screen
is operating at an existing facility in a downtown core full
of round-the-clock bright light
sources those seem like reasonable measures.”
Cookson claims that before
buying his condo in November 2010, he looked into what
kinds of zoning changes were
being planned for the area. He
found no paper trail. There was
no public record of the giant
screen’s introduction, “because
they snuck it up and ambushed
residents of this neighbourhood, and ambushed city hall.”
The 40-year-old environmental
consultant and his wife have
postponed having a baby, because he says they no longer
have the proper conditions at
home for a sleeping infant.
“I’m doing the right thing,
and I’ll tell you why. If you listen
to Mayor Robertson’s greenest city action plan, we’re trying to reduce the amount of
transport. My wife and I have
decided not to buy a car…. we
use public transport whenever
we leave downtown, but for the
most part we walk to work. And
that’s what city hall is telling us
we’re supposed to do.”
Cookson could well be Vision Vancouver’s poster boy:
a civic-minded professional
living sustainably in our ecoconscious corner of the Pacific
coast. If anyone has a right to
complain about a gap between
Vancouver’s ideals and its infrastructure, it’s this guy.
The Twitter feed StopBillboard
is thick with posted complaints
about the screen, including one
about the “inescapable ads”
flashing before daylight, at 7
a.m. Glaring injustice? On Monday, Mayor Robertson posted
the tweet, “I wrote to BC Govt
asking to address neighbour
concerns of light disruption +
be compliant w city by-law.”
It will be interesting to watch
this overlit production unfold.
www.geoffolson.com

Describing some protesters as white punks in black hoodies, as one columnist
photo Dan Toulgoet
did, promotes a double punk standard, says a reader.
To the editor:
Re: “Robertson’s post-riot duplicity
looms over Occupy Vancouver,” Nov. 2.
I love the edginess of the Courier. I’m
also not a fan of political correctness.
But I have to highlight Mark Hasiuk’s description of rioters: “white punks in black
hoodies.” I know he’s rifﬁng off the lyrics “white punks on dope.” Further more,
I empathize with his contempt for the
white punks in black hoodies. But really,
doesn’t it promote a double punk stan-

dard? As if white punks are held to a higher punk standard than other punk groups.
Me thinks that’s endowing them with too
much credit. I can’t remember many journalism articles that referred to the other
punks under their group banners. Perhaps
this is a new trend inspired by social media culpability?
Just calling it the way you see it and letting the chips fall where they may.
Richard Rajcic Jr.,
Vancouver

Put mixed housing on Jericho Lands

To the editor:
Re: Open letter to Vision
Vancouver and the NPA.
Two overriding issues for
the City of Vancouver, currently, are revenues/budgets
and housing. And although
there is a unique opportunity
to make a signiﬁcant positive
impact on both these vital areas, it’s being ignored. Or do
you and your party have a
plan for the 91 acres of land,
in the core of the city, called
the Jericho Lands (JL)?
The JL have some of the
highest property values in
Vancouver. And yet they appear totally exempt from city
taxation. There may be minor quid pro quo payments
to the city, which are not
available to the public, but I
understand they are far less
than the possible (depending on zoning) $5-6 million
of annual tax revenue these
lands could generate if made

available for housing.
These lands are situated
between Fourth and Eighth
avenues in the heart of West
Point Grey (WPG). They are
owned by the federal (53
acres) and provincial (38
acres) governments. The JL
may have had some importance to these governments
in the past, but even if the
feds still use them (the province does not), it is not a use
that couldn’t be duplicated on
much lower-value property.
Both governments could
certainly use the hundreds of
millions of dollars their sale
would raise. At the same time,
the city would also ﬁnally receive appropriate taxes from
these exceptional properties.
As well, hundreds of housing units could be created. If
a mixed development, 900 to
1,000 are possible.
Some WPG residents
want the JL as green space.

A laudable position, but in
this case we (I live in WPG)
already have an almost obscene amount of “green
space” compared to other
Vancouverites. For example,
for every 70 residents of
WPG, there is one acre of
park land. If the contiguous
Paciﬁc Spirit Park is included, this ratio drops to under 25 people per park acre
even after assuming 25,000
permanent residents on the
UBC endowment lands. By
comparison, the average ratio for the city is over 300. In
Grandview/Woodlands, it’s
over 1,100.
We need a plan for these
lands today. The other governments should be pushed
to either sell its JL or, if this
won’t happen soon, to properly compensate Vancouver for
leaving them undeveloped.
Jack Jefferson,
Vancouver

Louis’s longer bus idea won’t work

To the editor:
Re: “Council candidate longs for longer
buses,” Oct. 19.
I always wonder if [COPE candidate]
Tim Louis does any feasibility research on
his schemes before he opens his mouth.
Granted there is such a thing as a threesection bus that carries 50 more passengers
than the two section buses that now oper-

ate on the 99 B-Line. However, in cities
where those longer buses operate they’re
on ﬂat routes.
The 99 B-line buses go slow enough already
up hill on 10th Avenue. Can you imagine how
slow an even longer bus will go up that hill?
Not what I would call rapid transit.
Dale Laird,
Vancouver

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